Mashing It Up!

Riddle: Fill a ballroom of gearheads and teen gurus, and what do you get?


Oh, hush! "Snooze-fest!" is so not the right answer. What you get is this:a hopping conference about reaching today's totally wired generation with technology. Anastasia Goodstein, the award-winning blogger of Ypulse...

invited me to speak at the pre-conference, neither as a gearhead or a guru (thankfully!), but as an author for teens. It was so fun to be alongside the very talented Melissa Walker (Violet on the Runway and readergirlz pick for August)...

and NY Times bestselling Lisa McMann (Wake). Here's Lisa doing the "Justina Chen Headley" author photo pose. Which is actually the Katie Couric author photo pose. Anyhow, Lisa looks waaay cuter than either me and Katie.


One of the best parts of Ypulse was meeting my heroes...like Tracy Grand, CEO of JacketFlap, a social networking site for the publishing world. And then, of course, there was David Levithan (author extraordinaire, executive editor, man of many talents). It was as if my camera was embarrassed by my fangirl moment around him and blushed on my behalf.


I've decided that Cindy Eagan, the editor of the Gossip Girl series among others, needs to move next door to me so we can hang out all the time. And it's only because I like her so much that I've posted our picture...because does or does not my face look ginormous here? I'm sorry, but it does. And I cannot believe my sister who delicately blamed my still-blushing camera from above for creating an optical illusion.



And then there were the Girls Inc dream team: Allison Keilly and Claire Mysko (who wrote You're Amazing!):


And the girl who could have been the case study for Claire's book, Ashley Qualls, the teen creator of Whatever Life, who very generously outfitted me with a pink piggy bank, slinky, and water bottle. What I really wanted was her dress.